Hi there! 👋

I’m Dhyuthidhar, and if you’re new here, welcome! I love exploring computer science topics, especially machine learning, and breaking them down into easy-to-understand concepts. Today, let’s continue to talk about EC2.

Ever struggled with unpredictable customer traffic in your business? Imagine if your infrastructure could scale automatically based on demand—meet AWS Auto Scaling!

Steve is the founder of the company "StarTrack” and his friend Brent is the company's co-founder. One day, they were both sitting in the meeting hall with the company's major team in the conference room and discussing the problem they faced in their company about the data center. Steve is explaining about the problem to the whole team.

Problem Statement

Steve said, Hey guys! We have a problem with the data center we have, which is that we analyzed the data of the customers in a year. It tracks the number of customers who are entering our shops every time. Here is the graph:

So Steve said, In the first two quarters, they bought the hardware, which can cover the average number of customers, and it went well in those two quarters. The team began discussing the issue at hand. Steve pointed out, "In the other two quarters, we used high-capacity hardware that could accommodate all our customers. However, the problem lies in the first two quarters, where we struggled to serve customers on days with heavy foot traffic. And in the last two quarters, we faced the problem of less use of the hardware, around 10%. That’s it!

Brent believes this is a significant issue that requires a solution. Do any of you have suggestions?

Then Ben Palmer, the IT operations VP, mentioned AWS, which completely changed the conversation. He discussed the auto-scaling feature in AWS, which will help increase capacity whenever the software needs it and decrease it whenever it won’t. Thus, it is directly proportional to the number of customers using the software. Steve and Brent were impressed by his answer and told him to start working on it.

Today's topic is auto-scaling for EC2, so let me explain it to you.

• Based on the above situation, we can say there are two problems:

  • Worst Failure Situation

  • Problem with Scaling

• Let’s take the same old analogy of a coffee shop; here there are two employees in the company,

  • Rudy → works for the drinks

  • Morgan→ works behind the counter, taking orders.

Let’s deal with the first problem,

If the instance (Morgan) encounters an issue, such as an emergency or malfunction, AWS can immediately manage the situation by deploying an additional worker at that location. Using a programmatic approach, we can quickly create a second instance (a new Morgan) to ensure smooth operation. The same is true for the backend (Rudy).

Now let’s deal with the second problem

If the customers are increasing but there are fewer employees in the business, then to solve this problem, there are two ways to solve this:

Two Ways to handle growing Demand

There are two ways to handle growing demand:

1. Scale Up

2. Scale Out

Scale Up

Imagine you have Rudy and Morgan working in your company. There’s a high demand, and many customers are coming into your shop. Rudy is handling the orders, but Morgan is struggling to keep up with the crowd. To address this, you decide to upgrade his espresso machine, reducing the time it takes to make coffee. Additionally, you enhance some of Morgan’s skills, enabling him to work more efficiently and serve customers faster by taking and delivering orders promptly.

This is what scale up means in AWS, where you will increase the power of the EC2 instance from medium to large, so the instance gets stronger.

It is also known as vertical scaling.

Scale Out

Imagine the same situation, but this time, the number of customers is growing rapidly. Rudy is taking orders at lightning speed, but Morgan is struggling to prepare the coffee quickly enough. To address this, let’s assign another Morgan to help. This way, Rudy can pass the orders to two Morgans, enabling them to complete the orders more efficiently.

• This is like launching multiple smaller EC2 instances instead of upgrading a single one.

• Instead of making one server stronger, you add more servers and distribute the load using a load balancer.

• This is also called Horizontal Scaling.

There’s a potential issue here: additional instances were added to ensure customers received their orders faster, which made them happy. When demand drops, running extra instances leads to unnecessary costs. AWS addresses this problem by automatically removing instances when demand decreases.

All these tasks can be done by a feature in AWS that is AWS EC2 auto scaling, which adds instances based on demand and then removes them when they are no longer needed.

We solved the scaling problems using Amazon EC2 auto scaling.

Conclusion

By leveraging AWS EC2 Auto Scaling, StarTrack successfully addressed its data center challenges. The company previously faced two major issues: under-provisioning during peak demand and over-provisioning during low traffic periods. Both resulted in either poor customer experience or unnecessary costs.

Through Auto Scaling, the system can now dynamically scale out (add instances) when demand increases and scale in (remove instances) when demand decreases. This optimizes resources, cuts costs, and ensures high availability—without manual effort.

However, another challenge arises when multiple instances are running—how do we efficiently distribute traffic among them to avoid bottlenecks or overloading a single instance? Managing traffic distribution effectively is crucial to ensuring smooth operations and maintaining system performance.

But wait—scaling alone isn’t enough! How do we balance traffic across multiple instances efficiently? Stay tuned for our next blog, where we’ll uncover the secret to seamless load balancing!

Ultimately, AWS EC2 Auto Scaling has provided StarTrack with a flexible, cost-effective, and reliable infrastructure, allowing them to seamlessly manage customer traffic fluctuations while maintaining performance and efficiency.

Action Step:

Are you facing similar challenges with managing your infrastructure? Don’t let unpredictable traffic impact your business operations! Start leveraging AWS EC2 Auto Scaling today to ensure seamless performance, cost efficiency, and high availability.

Stay tuned for our next blog, where we’ll tackle the traffic distribution problem and explore how to manage it effectively.

Got questions or need help setting up Auto Scaling for your business? Reach out to us today and take your infrastructure to the next level! 🚀

Why I Share This

Simon Squibb believes that the best way to share knowledge is to make it simple and accessible. And that’s exactly what I do—I break down complex tech into something easy and exciting.

Tech should inspire you, not intimidate you.

Imagine a world without the cloud—every startup would need huge investments just to get started. AWS changed that game. The cloud lets anyone with an idea build something incredible without worrying about infrastructure.

I share knowledge this way because I want you to feel that excitement too.

If this post made you think differently about tech, check out my other blogs. Let’s make tech easy and exciting—together! 🚀